Checklist to Keep in Mind When Hiring a WordPress Maintenance Service Provider

Running a successful, WordPress based website or blog requires more than just publishing new content and engaging in promotional activities. Just like most things, it requires regular updates and routine maintenance checks to keep your website safe and performing at its best.

A lot of people often ask these questions as to why WordPress maintenance is important and why do people put so much emphasis on it? Here are a few consequences of overlooking your site maintenance:

·         Core features and functions may break down

·         The site may take too long to load

·         Your site may infect your visitors' computer devices

·         Your visitors may not be able to find or effectively consume your website content

·         You might get hacked or be delisted from major research engines

Hence, to avoid these glitches that can impact your future in the digital world, you need to hire the right service provider, like WPPals. Regular maintenance is the best thing you can do for your website to ensure it continues to drive you towards your business and personal goals. 

However, when hiring your WordPress maintenance service provider, keep this checklist in mind to ensure your website continues to perform smoothly.   

Back-Up Your Website

Your website back up is like an insurance policy, you hope never to need it, but it can save you in tough times. Hardware and software malfunction can make you partially or entirely lose your data, and creating a site back up from scratch can be extremely costly and time-consuming. Hence, make sure your maintenance plan includes regular back up of your site on a cloud-based platform.

Find Out About Downtime

Even though a lot of website hosting companies promise 99.9% uptime, the responsibility of no downtime still falls on you. Every second that your site is inaccessible, you are possibly losing a valuable amount of traffic and damaging your company's reputation. Your WordPress maintenance service provider can keep you informed when and in case your site does down, so you can make sure its back online as soon as possible.

Provide Strong Security

As, around one-third of all websites are built using WordPress, content management system, it opens up a wide range of targets for hackers. An effective way to protect your site against hackers and unauthorized admin accounts are to follow the practice of continuous monitoring of any zero-day vulnerabilities or leak profiles that may provide a gateway to the hackers. WordPress site security is not a one-time activity, but it's an ongoing process. It means that your WordPress maintenance plan includes regular updates and several other tactics that strengthen your security.

Keeping Up With Regular Updates

If you have been dealing with WordPress long enough, you would know the platform offers a lot of updates. However, your maintenance service provider helps you manage WordPress core, theme, and plugin updates. They also make sure the update doesn't conflict with any website feature or functionality and you have back up in place before installing the update.

Perform Visual Inspection

It is crucial to make visual inspections at least once a week, as they ensure your website looks and functions at its best, at all times. They help check if there are any issues with content formatting or page layout. Here are a few elements that a thorough visual inspection would include:

·         The cross-browser compatibility check ensures your site performs well on popular and commonly used browsers.

·         The responsiveness check ensures your site adapts to provide valuable user experience to visitors with different screen sizes like smartphones, tablets, and desktop computers.

·         Check all forms integrated on your website to ensure your user journey and experience is optimized.

Optimize Your Database

WordPress stores your data in table form within a database, including your webpages, blog posts, comments, users, categories, settings, and so on. Over some time, the database gets bloated due to junk data like spam comments, unwanted drafts, and uninstalled plugins. The unnecessary data can slow down your site by weighing down the database.

However, maintenance plans often include monthly optimizing and cleaning up of the WordPress database to improve site performance.

Performance Audit And Optimization

One of the primary purposes of your website is to ensure your customers can easily find you. Hence, having a website that ranks low on Google due to low speed is of no use. Your WordPress maintenance service provider performs regular audits to identify areas that can improve your loading time and deliver a more pleasant user experience. They offer you different ways like image optimization and caching to help your improve your speed.

Conclusion

This checklist should help you realize that if your own a WordPress site, you cannot ignore your responsibility to ensure its regular maintenance. Your website needs support and technical assistance to stay in excellent health and perform at its best. This WordPress maintenance checklist includes a few important ways your service provider can empower you and your site. However, it is essential to find the right maintenance team that understands your and your website's needs.